Ashwathi A Nair
Roll no:7
Morphology
In linguistics, morphology is the study of words, how they are formed, and their relationship to
other words in the same language.It analyzes the structure of words and parts of words, such as
stems, root words, prefixes, and suffixes. Morphology also looks at parts of speech, intonation
and stress, and the ways context can change a word's pronunciation and meaning. Morphology
differs from morphological typology, which is the classification of languages based on their use
of words,and lexicology, which is the study of words and how they make up a language's
vocabulary.
While words, along with clitics, are generally accepted as being the smallest units of syntax, in
most languages, if not all, many words can be related to other words by rules that collectively
describe the grammar for that language. For example, English speakers recognize that the
words dog and dogs are closely related, differentiated only by the plurality morpheme "-s", only
found bound to noun phrases. Speakers of English, a fusional language, recognize these
relations from their innate knowledge of English's rules of word formation.These are understood
as grammars that represent the morphology of the language. The rules understood by a
speaker reflect specific patterns or regularities in the way words are formed from smaller units in
the language they are using, and how those smaller units interact in speech. In this way,
morphology is the branch of linguistics that studies patterns of word formation within and across
languages and attempts to formulate rules that model the knowledge of the speakers of those
languages
The discipline that deals specifically with the sound changes occurring within morphemes is
morphophonology
Lexemes and word forms
The term "word" has no well-defined meaning. Instead, two related terms are used in
morphology: lexeme and word-form. Generally, a lexeme is a set of inflected word-forms that is
often represented with the citation form in small capitals.For instance, the lexeme eat contains
the word-forms eat, eats, eaten, and ate. Eat and eats are thus considered different word-forms
belonging to the same lexeme eat. Eat and Eater, on the other hand, are different lexemes, as
they refer to two different concepts.
Prosodic word vs. morphological word
Here are examples from other languages of the failure of a single phonological word to coincide
with a single morphological word form. In Latin, one way to express the concept of
'noun-phrase1 and noun-phrase2' (as in "apples and oranges") is to suffix '-que' to the second
, noun phrase: "apples oranges-and", as it were. An extreme level of this theoretical quandary
posed by some phonological words is provided by the Kwak'wala language. In Kwak'wala, as in
a great many other languages, meaning relations between nouns, including possession and
"semantic case", are formulated by affixes instead of by independent "words". The three-word
English phrase, "with his club", where 'with' identifies its dependent noun phrase as an
instrument and 'his' denotes a possession relation, would consist of two words or even just one
word in many languages. Unlike most languages, Kwak'wala semantic affixes phonologically
attach not to the lexeme they pertain to semantically, but to the preceding lexeme.Apparently, a
wide variety of languages make use of the hybrid linguistic unit clitic, possessing the
grammatical features of independent words but the prosodic-phonological lack of freedom of
bound morphemes. The intermediate status of clitics poses a considerable challenge to
linguistic theory.
Inflection vs. word formation
Given the notion of a lexeme, it is possible to distinguish two kinds of morphological rules. Some
morphological rules relate to different forms of the same lexeme; while other rules relate to
different lexemes. Rules of the first kind are inflectional rules, while those of the second kind are
rules of word formation.The generation of the English plural dogs from dog is an inflectional rule,
while compound phrases and words like dog catcher or dishwasher are examples of word
formation. Informally, word formation rules form "new" words (more accurately, new lexemes),
while inflection rules yield variant forms of the "same" word (lexeme).
The distinction between inflection and word formation is not at all clear cut. There are many
examples where linguists fail to agree whether a given rule is inflection or word formation. The
next section will attempt to clarify this distinction.
Word formation is a process where one combines two complete words, whereas with inflection
you can combine a suffix with some verb to change its form to subject of the sentence. For
example: in the present indefinite, we use ‘go’ with subject I/we/you/they and plural nouns,
whereas for third person singular pronouns (he/she/it) and singular nouns we use ‘goes’. So this
‘-es’ is an inflectional marker and is used to match with its subject. A further difference is that in
word formation, the resultant word may differ from its source word's grammatical category
whereas in the process of inflection the word never changes its grammatical category.
Types of word formation
There is a further distinction between two primary kinds of morphological word formation:
derivation and compounding. Compounding is a process of word formation that involves
combining complete word forms into a single compound form. Dog catcher, therefore, is a
compound, as both dog and catcher are complete word forms in their own right but are
subsequently treated as parts of one form. Derivation involves affixing bound (i.e.
non-independent) forms to existing lexemes, whereby the addition of the affix derives a new
Roll no:7
Morphology
In linguistics, morphology is the study of words, how they are formed, and their relationship to
other words in the same language.It analyzes the structure of words and parts of words, such as
stems, root words, prefixes, and suffixes. Morphology also looks at parts of speech, intonation
and stress, and the ways context can change a word's pronunciation and meaning. Morphology
differs from morphological typology, which is the classification of languages based on their use
of words,and lexicology, which is the study of words and how they make up a language's
vocabulary.
While words, along with clitics, are generally accepted as being the smallest units of syntax, in
most languages, if not all, many words can be related to other words by rules that collectively
describe the grammar for that language. For example, English speakers recognize that the
words dog and dogs are closely related, differentiated only by the plurality morpheme "-s", only
found bound to noun phrases. Speakers of English, a fusional language, recognize these
relations from their innate knowledge of English's rules of word formation.These are understood
as grammars that represent the morphology of the language. The rules understood by a
speaker reflect specific patterns or regularities in the way words are formed from smaller units in
the language they are using, and how those smaller units interact in speech. In this way,
morphology is the branch of linguistics that studies patterns of word formation within and across
languages and attempts to formulate rules that model the knowledge of the speakers of those
languages
The discipline that deals specifically with the sound changes occurring within morphemes is
morphophonology
Lexemes and word forms
The term "word" has no well-defined meaning. Instead, two related terms are used in
morphology: lexeme and word-form. Generally, a lexeme is a set of inflected word-forms that is
often represented with the citation form in small capitals.For instance, the lexeme eat contains
the word-forms eat, eats, eaten, and ate. Eat and eats are thus considered different word-forms
belonging to the same lexeme eat. Eat and Eater, on the other hand, are different lexemes, as
they refer to two different concepts.
Prosodic word vs. morphological word
Here are examples from other languages of the failure of a single phonological word to coincide
with a single morphological word form. In Latin, one way to express the concept of
'noun-phrase1 and noun-phrase2' (as in "apples and oranges") is to suffix '-que' to the second
, noun phrase: "apples oranges-and", as it were. An extreme level of this theoretical quandary
posed by some phonological words is provided by the Kwak'wala language. In Kwak'wala, as in
a great many other languages, meaning relations between nouns, including possession and
"semantic case", are formulated by affixes instead of by independent "words". The three-word
English phrase, "with his club", where 'with' identifies its dependent noun phrase as an
instrument and 'his' denotes a possession relation, would consist of two words or even just one
word in many languages. Unlike most languages, Kwak'wala semantic affixes phonologically
attach not to the lexeme they pertain to semantically, but to the preceding lexeme.Apparently, a
wide variety of languages make use of the hybrid linguistic unit clitic, possessing the
grammatical features of independent words but the prosodic-phonological lack of freedom of
bound morphemes. The intermediate status of clitics poses a considerable challenge to
linguistic theory.
Inflection vs. word formation
Given the notion of a lexeme, it is possible to distinguish two kinds of morphological rules. Some
morphological rules relate to different forms of the same lexeme; while other rules relate to
different lexemes. Rules of the first kind are inflectional rules, while those of the second kind are
rules of word formation.The generation of the English plural dogs from dog is an inflectional rule,
while compound phrases and words like dog catcher or dishwasher are examples of word
formation. Informally, word formation rules form "new" words (more accurately, new lexemes),
while inflection rules yield variant forms of the "same" word (lexeme).
The distinction between inflection and word formation is not at all clear cut. There are many
examples where linguists fail to agree whether a given rule is inflection or word formation. The
next section will attempt to clarify this distinction.
Word formation is a process where one combines two complete words, whereas with inflection
you can combine a suffix with some verb to change its form to subject of the sentence. For
example: in the present indefinite, we use ‘go’ with subject I/we/you/they and plural nouns,
whereas for third person singular pronouns (he/she/it) and singular nouns we use ‘goes’. So this
‘-es’ is an inflectional marker and is used to match with its subject. A further difference is that in
word formation, the resultant word may differ from its source word's grammatical category
whereas in the process of inflection the word never changes its grammatical category.
Types of word formation
There is a further distinction between two primary kinds of morphological word formation:
derivation and compounding. Compounding is a process of word formation that involves
combining complete word forms into a single compound form. Dog catcher, therefore, is a
compound, as both dog and catcher are complete word forms in their own right but are
subsequently treated as parts of one form. Derivation involves affixing bound (i.e.
non-independent) forms to existing lexemes, whereby the addition of the affix derives a new
